Feed aggregator

Victoria energy minister says government making good progress towards first offshore wind auction, despite port infrastructure setback.

The post Australia’s first offshore wind auction could open within months, contracts awarded by end of 2026 appeared first on RenewEconomy.

A New York-based developer of nature-based carbon projects announced on Wednesday the sale of its first batch of Improved Forest Management (IFM) offsets for $34 each.

We think of laughing kookaburras as common in Australia and their call certainly lets us know when they’re about. But several factors are driving down their numbers. Diana Kuchinke, Lecturer in Ecology, Federation University Australia Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

Ongoing carbon permit sales under REPoweEU, combined with increasing renewables penetration and lower demand from the power and industrial sectors, mean EUAs will likely feel increased price pressures for another 18 months, a conference heard Wednesday.

A California-headquartered fossil fuel firm announced its third and largest venture capital fund to date of $500 million, focused on clean energy technologies to improve its core business and drive lower carbon options.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for a phase out of fossil fuels at the Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank on Wednesday.

Dubai has been hit by record floods, sparking misleading speculation about cloud seeding.

Scientists say a fossilised jawbone found in Somerset may be from one of the biggest sea creatures ever.

The EU's green claims directive is having a tangible, negative impact on demand for voluntary carbon credits, and scaring corporates away from the market, participants told an event Wednesday.

The European Commission is looking at whether residual emissions in the EU ETS could be offset with carbon removals, as it weighs up different options for either integrating removals into the existing market or creating a new one, a high-level official said on Wednesday.

Commitments made at an international ocean conference in Athens have sparked optimism for the future of marine conservation, though concerns remain over the effective implementation of the laws against illegal activities, conservationists have said.

Regulatory measures on agricultural emissions, from New Zealand to South Africa, could serve as inspiration for policymakers in Brussels as the EU considers if and how to include the sector in its next ETS revision — although some clauses may apply, according to speakers at the IETA European Climate Summit.

The global economy is already committed to an income reduction of 19% until 2050 due to climate change, even if CO2 emissions were to be drastically cut starting from today, according to a study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between California and Norway signed Tuesday, establishes a framework of voluntary cooperation on areas including clean energy, zero-emission transportation and ports, carbon removal, and climate-smart agriculture.

Cost of environmental damage will be six times higher than price of limiting global heating to 2C, study finds

Average incomes will fall by almost a fifth within the next 26 years as a result of the climate crisis, according to a study that predicts the costs of damage will be six times higher than the price of limiting global heating to 2C.

Rising temperatures, heavier rainfall and more frequent and intense extreme weather are projected to cause $38tn (£30tn) of destruction each year by mid-century, according to the research, which is the most comprehensive analysis of its type ever undertaken, and whose findings are published in the journal Nature.

Continue reading...

Renewables drive down wholesale prices in first quarter, but a massive coal outage and a heatwave drove prices up in two coal dependent states.

The post Renewables drive down prices in first quarter, but heatwaves and outages cause spikes in coal dominated grids appeared first on RenewEconomy.

Government support for green manufacturing is actually the easy part. To truly reduce emissions, we must stop digging up and burning fossil fuels

• Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

Last week Anthony Albanese finally announced the government’s major plan for the transition to a renewable energy economy. The Future Made in Australia plan was quickly derided by critics as “picking winners”, in the misguided view that the market is better at deciding how to tackle climate change and that the market is in any way free or lacking distortions.

It’s an article of faith among many economists and commentators that governments should not try to “pick winners”, despite the fact that Australia has a long and glorious tradition of doing so.

Continue reading...

Westerners see elephants as pets, said Mokgweetsi Masisi, whose government threatened to send 30,000 elephants to Germany and the UK to demonstrate their dangers

Many Europeans value the lives of elephants more than those of the people who live around them, the president of Botswana has said, amid tensions over potential trophy hunting import bans.

Botswana recently threatened to send 30,000 elephants to the UK and Germany after both countries proposed stricter controls on hunting trophies. The country’s president, Mokgweetsi Masisi, said it would help people to understand human-wildlife conflict – which is among the primary threats to the species – including the experiences of subsistence farmers affected by crop-raiding by the animals.

Continue reading...

The European Commission will prioritise Article 6 and voluntary markets as part of its international outreach efforts, in addition to compliance carbon markets, a senior EU official said on Wednesday.

Implementing an EU-wide biodiversity monitoring platform could cost up to €40 billion over the next decade, with each euro invested estimated to pay off up to 10 times, a researcher involved in the project said Wednesday.